Operation Dropshot

Operation Dropshot
Part of the Cold War
Shot Apple 2, where the 723rd Tank Battalion participated in a tactical maneuver test as part of the nuclear test
Date 1 January 1957 (projected). Objectives: To impose the national war objectives of the United States on the USSR and its allies Location Western and Northern Europe, the Middle East, the North Atlantic, and the Far East Status Never carried out
Belligerents
United States Western Bloc	Soviet Union Soviet Bloc
Casualties and losses
none	none

In US military history, Operation Dropshot (1949) was the codename for a contingency military operation plan for possible wars (nuclear and conventional) against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact should they invade and occupy Western Europe, the Near East, and Eastern Asia. At that stage of the Russo–American Cold War, the US Defense Department expected the Soviet Union to invade those places in 1957. The plan for Operation Dropshot was prepared in 1949, in the early post-war years of the Cold War (1918–1991). Despite the defensive-war scenario for each possible theatre of war, Operation Dropshot included the contingent use of nuclear weapons against the military forces of the Soviet Union and of the Warsaw Pact.

In 1949, the US nuclear arsenal was small, based mostly in the continental United States, and depended upon bomber aeroplaness to deliver and drop atomic bombs upon enemy targets. The plans of Operation Dropshot include mission profiles that deployed 300 nuclear bombs and 29,000 high-explosive bombs against 200 targets in 100 cities and towns throughout the USSR, in order to destroy approximately 85 per cent of the industrial capabilities of the Soviet Union; of the 300 nuclear weapons to be deployed, between 75 and 100 nuclear weapons were targeted to destroy Soviet Union's combat aircraft on the ground.

The scenario for Operation Dropshot was conceptualized before the successful development of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and indicated that the war plans would become void when ICBM rocketry became a cost-effective means for dropping nuclear bombs on people, places, and things. The military-plan documents for Operation Dropshot were declassified in 1977, and published in 1978 as the book Dropshot: The American Plan for World War III Against the Soviet Union in 1957.^[1] In the event, the US Department of Defense did not approve Operation Dropshot and withdrew that war plan in February 1951 which then was superseded by Reaper, a war plan about a Soviet–American war in 1954.^[2]

See also

• United States war plans (1945–1950)
• Plan Totality
• Operation Unthinkable
• Seven Days to the River Rhine
• Basic Encyclopedia

References

1. Dropshot: The United States Plan for War with the Soviet Union in 1957. Dial Press/J. Wade. 1978. ISBN 0-8037-2148-X.
2. Rearden, Steven L., (2012). Council of War: History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, (Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff), p 111, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/History/Institutional/Council_of_War.pdf

Sources

• Ross, Steven T. (1996). American War Plans, 1945-1950: Strategies for Defeating the Soviet Union. Frank Cass.
• "Dropshot - American Plan for War with the Soviet Union 1957". www.allworldwars.com. Retrieved 2020-10-01.

External links

• John J. Reilly, "World War III in 1957" via johnreilly.info, archived at Internet Archive, 2006
• George Hulett, "Cold War Warrior", Air Classics, 21 August 2004